Back in '96, when B and I were in NC, my folks came down to visit. We drove up to Virginia to see … something to do with Woodrow Wilson … and were listening to the news on the radio. There was a story about SC looking to buy other states' nuclear waste and sink it in the swamp. B, my mother, and I expressed various shades of horror, but my dad confidently said, "There are minds greater than ours working on these problems." He didn't enjoy my response that it was those same great minds that created those problems. But he was from a generation where experts and smart people solved problems (and didn't acknowledge the problems they caused).

It's weird because a friend of mine works there and I had the chance to, but most of the lower-ranking people who work there, like, write the video tickers or news in brief, have to submit 20, 40 ideas a week with minimal recycling, and there are a lot of rules about how to do shit. The atmosphere is shockingly corporate and not fun at all. Dude quit a job because the Onion ate up too much of his time each week. And for the year he's worked there, he's gotten a grand total of zero things on the front page. A lot of the ideas are for long-term in-development TV and web projects.

Billy Joel wrote:It's weird because a friend of mine works there and I had the chance to, but most of the lower-ranking people who work there, like, write the video tickers or news in brief, have to submit 20, 40 ideas a week with minimal recycling, and there are a lot of rules about how to do shit. The atmosphere is shockingly corporate and not fun at all. Dude quit a job because the Onion ate up too much of his time each week. And for the year he's worked there, he's gotten a grand total of zero things on the front page. A lot of the ideas are for long-term in-development TV and web projects.

Billy Joel wrote:It's weird because a friend of mine works there and I had the chance to, but most of the lower-ranking people who work there, like, write the video tickers or news in brief, have to submit 20, 40 ideas a week with minimal recycling, and there are a lot of rules about how to do shit. The atmosphere is shockingly corporate and not fun at all. Dude quit a job because the Onion ate up too much of his time each week. And for the year he's worked there, he's gotten a grand total of zero things on the front page. A lot of the ideas are for long-term in-development TV and web projects.

That doesn't surprise me at all.

To be fair, high quality comedy, especially satire, isn't easy, so having a demanding structure around it probably is necessary. Writing has to be treated as a job; if you're just waiting for inspiration, you're going to spend a lot of time jerking off.